Family Murders: A Thriller Page 5

  The evidence against him was strong. A cursory search of the house turned up the murder weapon, a filet knife sitting in plain sight on the kitchen counter. It was part of a set that belonged to the house, and the blood on it was Gabby's. Two fingerprints were recovered, and they corresponded to Eric's right index finger and thumb. As far as detectives could tell, she had been assaulted and killed in her own room, then dragged down the stairs and out onto the porch. Some of the wounds were deep and violent enough to suggest the strength of a larger male. But if Eric had the power to carry the body then he could have inflicted the damage too. He had access to the knife and he had touched it, and he had been all alone in the house with his sister. It was clear means and opportunity.

  As far as motive was concerned, semen recovered during the autopsy told detectives all they needed to know. Once it was typed and found to be the same blood type as the victim's brother, most of the police working the case started closing up shop, calling it a day. In the span of twelve hours Eric Fallows moved from potential witness to suspect to certain murderer.

  As it turned out, there were no witnesses. The Fallows lived on a farm. The whole area was rural, but their piece of land particularly so, with a half-mile gravel drive and a house shielded on all sides by poplar and birch. Only Eric's word stood against the damning facts of the case: the blood; the murder weapon; the body. Besides, he was the only suspect. There was some speculation about why then he would call 911 on himself, but the average response from both government officials and the writers of editorials amounted to this: if you're crazy enough to rape and murder your own sister, then you're crazy enough to do a lot of things.

  There was rampant speculation at trial about psychopathy and sociopathy and many other pathologies, including the influence of the horror genre and movies like John Carpenter's Halloween, which had come out only two years ago at the time. Whatever the spin, everyone agreed he was crazy. No one would say it in court—people were hoping for an execution—but there seemed no other explanation.

  Two things counted toward a conclusion of sanity.

  One, a lot of people had know Eric Fallows for a long time. He had always been considered a shy boy, but upstanding. By all accounts he had been devoted to his sister. The father was a lush, the mother long gone, and in many ways Gabby was the only family the boy had ever had. Though there seemed no other explanation for her death, most God-fearing local people prided themselves on being able to recognize evil, and resented the idea of being hoodwinked all these years by one of their own. Some flat-out refused to believe it.

  And two, Eric Fallows never once wavered in his story. In all the tellings he gave of it—and between the cops and the lawyers and the press there may have been hundreds—details, small details, were always the same. Perhaps he had spent his supposed catatonia constructing a tale that would exonerate him, but to be unhinged enough to commit the crime and yet collected enough to fabricate the story seemed almost too terrible to contemplate. It implied a person who knew exactly what he was doing, while he was doing it, a man who enjoyed his work. Certainly he enjoyed the murder (in later articles it was described as a "sexual frenzy") and now he was putting as much flair and theatricality into his defense, joyfully pulling the wool down over they eyes of an entire town.

  His story was this: the elder Fallows had been out of town for some time. Everyone described this as less than unusual. Gabby was in second grade, and every day she would be dropped off at the end of the driveway by a school bus at around two-thirty in the afternoon. Her routine was that she would walk the last half-mile to the house and then take care of herself for between ninety minutes and two hours, depending on when Eric would get home. He worked part-time as a welder and would usually be back by four-thirty at the latest.

  On Monday, November the 10th, one day before the murder, a small gas leak was discovered in the welding shop where Eric worked. The shop was cleared out and the foreman started questioning employees because a gas leak would cause problems with permits. The facts pointed to one veteran employee, who insisted the work in question had been performed by the new guy, the kid, and pointed to Eric. Words between Eric and the foreman became heated. He wouldn't admit any fault, said some things he shouldn't have, got fired. Later, after the case was under way, the veteran employee admitted it had been his fault while being questioned by detectives. Eric had been telling the truth.

  Those events added up to Eric walking home just like on any other day, only about two hours earlier. He walked home and was at the end of his driveway by two forty-five, half-expecting to run into Gabby there. In fact he did run into her, but she wasn't alone. In Eric's story, someone else was there too.

  Eric said he had turned the corner and seen a cherry-red, two-door Dodge Challenger, idling, sitting halfway between him and the house. It was pointed down towards the street, and as he got closer Eric could see Gabby through the windscreen. She was sitting low, nearly swallowed up by the leather of the passenger seat, but he could see her face. She looked scared. Then came the soft grind of gears meshing as the transmission fell into first.

  There's no way to tell what might have happened in a given situation, only what did happen. Eric was always adamant the car was about to take off. He was sure it was about to drive away with his sister, so he started to run. The driveway was narrow and he kept to the center of it, leaving no room for a vehicle to pass. He said he was sure the car would hit him, but in the end it braked hard. Standing with his hands spread on the hood, staring his sister in the face, the engine cut off. The driver's door swept open and a man in a leather jacket climbed out, a man Eric had never seen before.

  The man looked at him. After the sprint and the certainty that something was wrong, now he wasn't sure. This guy looked so…normal. Could be be one of Dad's friends or something? Eric wasn't sure what to say, and so he had defaulted to a weakly mustered "What are you doing?"

  "Just going for a drive."

  "Do I know you?" Eric said. "Do you know my Dad?"

  "Yeah."

  But he was only about five or eight years older than Eric himself. It still felt wrong. "Get out of the car, Gabby."

  "Stay in the car, Gabby." The man had his arm extended in an authoritative point. Eric's eyes followed the line, and once again he realized how scared Gabby looked.

  "Hey, who are you?"

  "I don't think she wants to get out," he said. "I think she wants to go for a drive. Have some fun." His face lit up in a wide smile.

  "Look, I don't know you. I'm sure you think you're making a little girl's day."

  "Okay, okay, I get it." He turned and walked around the trunk, hooked back to the passenger door, opened it and held it open. "Guess we can't go for a ride today."

  Gabby took a tentative step out and looked up at the man, who shrugged. Seeing he wouldn't stop her, she ran around the corner of the door and right at Eric. In any other situation he might have crouched for the inevitable hug, but right now it felt too vulnerable to do anything other than stand tall. Gabby clung to his leg instead.

  "I'm sorry, Eric." She started to cry. "I didn't mean to go in the car. I just wanted these. He said I could have them."

  With her face still buried in the thigh of his grimy canvas work pants, she pushed her arm up at Eric, palm turned up, displaying a pair of pink plastic sunglasses. She started to shake.

  "What happened?" Eric's kept his eyes on the man, who grinned and shrugged again.

  "He said he was taking me on a trip," Gabby said. "He we would travel together. Forever. He said we would always be together and I would never have to come home. But I want to go home, Eric!"

  Eric's face darkened. "Give me those." He took the sunglasses. "And run up to the house now. You didn't do anything wrong."

  In a few moments the two of them were alone. Gabby was headed like a bullet for the house, still seemingly unable to move at anything less than a run. The man turned and shut the passenger door. Didn't say anything.

  "What
the fuck do you think you're doing?"

  "The girl wanted to ride. Just giving her what she wants." He grinned again.

  Eric took a few steps forward. "Here," he tossed the sunglasses, "take these and get off my property. Don't come back."

  "Oh no, won't do that. I promise. But hey, it's a big world, right? Maybe I'll run into your sister out in it. Eric."

  "If I see you anywhere near my sister, I'll—"

  "You'll what?" The stranger cut him off and stepped forward. They were the same height, but Eric had never been a heavyweight.

  "You'll do shit, that's what. The girl wanted to ride, Eric. She wanted it—that's what you have to get used to. They all want it. If I don't give it to them someone else will. It's not me you should be afraid of. I'm not the problem."

  "You piece of shit. You come to my house—"

  "She wanted it, Eric." He grinned again.

  "—and talk to my sister—"

  "She wanted to ride." He started to laugh. "They all want to ride." He threw back his head and let loose a kind of howl. "And there's nothing you can do about that."

  But there was. Eric felt sure of that. Some piece inside of him sagged and gave way, soft and gentle as a sheet coming unclipped and fluttering to the ground. He hit him. Right as his laughter dimmed and his head dropped down on the level, Eric hit him right on the button, as hard as he could.

  There was surprise in the man's face before he hit the ground. Eric knew the type, the kind of person who came from some bit of money, from the kind of family with time-outs instead of belts. He was the kind of guy that threatens to fight, but never does. He'd probably never been hit in his whole life.

  Eric didn't come from that type of place. He hated people who did. You fire me from my job, you fuck with my sister, you come here, to my house—Eric realized he was kneeling over guy, hitting him again and again. The man was curled in fetal position. Eric kept hitting. He was crawling away towards his car. Eric grabbed an ankle and dragged him across the gravel, picked up a big rock, and stopped. Enough, he thought. Enough.

  "Get the fuck out of here." Eric leaned down and picked up the plastic sunglasses lying in the dirt and tossed them through the car window. "Don't let me see you around here again." He turned and walked toward the house. He didn't turn around.

  Later, after the engine had started and the car had sped away, there was a lingering afterimage on his retina: the man on the ground, arms crossed and extended in front of him, protecting against the coming blow. There was fear on his face. But there was also something more, a hybrid of hatred and shame—shame that he was laying in the dirt taking a beating. Shame that he had been reduced in stature, and hatred for the person who had put him in his place.

  The next day Eric went and tried to get his job back. The best time was between shifts. Factoring in the time it took to walk into town, he knew he wouldn't be there when Gabby got home, but he told her to go straight into the house, lock the door, and wait for him to come home. Eric wasn't rehired, and after leaving the welding shop at around three-thirty in the afternoon, he said he had taken a long walk to clear his head.

  He arrived home just before six, and claimed his first sign something was wrong was discovering the bloody fillet knife on the kitchen counter. The blood was beginning to dry and to lose its vibrant red hue, so he had been unsure what it was, and picked the knife up to examine it further. Upstairs, he found the mutilated body, called 911 from the phone in the master bedroom, and tried to carry his sister downstairs to get her closer to the ambulance.

  He later described the one detail that had lead him to be unable to speak when police showed up: his sister's body had been propped up in a desk chair and faced towards the door; her hair had been tied to the chair to keep her head level; on her face, covering her eyes, were a pair of pink plastic sunglasses.

  Eric believed he would have reacted differently to the simple death of his sister, say in an accident, but in this case he knew that her death was his fault. It was payback, plain and simple. The display of the body, the sunglasses, were all meant as a message, a message written just for him. All the things Gabby had endured were intended as revenge, and the sunglasses were a signature.

  "From him to me," Eric had said. And he had said it again and again, telling the story again and again, without ever changing a detail or getting caught in some small fabrication.

  The story was compelling at trial. Eric's lawyers presented it as an alternate theory of the crime, and though the police tried and tried, there was no way to prove events didn't unfold exactly as Eric described. There were no witnesses, and the story seemed to explain all the physical evidence.

  All the parts of Eric's story that could be verified were. He had been fired, he had come and tried to get his job back, but for the two hours he supposedly spent walking—the two hours during which, in the opinion of the coroner, Gabby's life had bled out of her—no witnesses or alibi could be found.

  There were no witnesses to the supposed altercation the day before either. No one remembered a red Challenger driving by, or a big man in his twenties wearing a leather jacket. At trial, the prosecution emphasized that this story relied solely on the word of a suspected murderer. That was true. The defense could not produce one scrap of evidence that the man in the red car was anything other than the fabrication of a very sick mind.

  The semen was typed to match Eric, but the defense was quick to point out the number of people who had the same blood type and would also be a match. In most people's opinion, not much weight was given to this evidence by the jury. The most compelling day of the trial, according to many of the journalists, was the day Eric took the stand. A murder trial is judged by the standard of reasonable doubt, and at the end of the day no one could say things hadn't happened just the way he said. Combined with testimony that was described in more than one article as "riveting," a not guilty verdict was returned.

  Some people said it was for the best, that the town needed to heal, not take revenge on a boy who'd grown up there. When the subject of justice came up, whether he'd actually done it, those same people tended to clam up. It was a sore spot that he had managed to live among them, undetected, for all those years. In their heart of hearts, most people seemed glad enough the damage had been contained in Eric's own family, and happy enough to leave it at that.

  One of the more vocal locals, one who still seemed perfectly willing to lambast the Fallows clan in print months after the trial had ended, declared with some theatricality that he had "witnessed the birth of a sociopath. That boy has been nurturing a seed of something inside him for a long time, and at the end of last year, I saw it come into bloom."

  At least it seemed theatrical in retrospect. Reading between the lines, one could get a sense of a town that needed to either do some serious soul-searching or forget it ever happened. Towns are like the people who live in them—most choose the latter.

  ***

  Angela sat back in her chair, unable to believe the town in the story was her town. It had been almost two years since Ted had decided he wanted to move back. She knew plenty of people who had lived their whole lives there, whose parents and grandparents had, and no one had ever breathed a word of it, as gossip or anything else. Angela supposed the story couldn't go on for ever. As far as headlines went, "Child Murderer Still On Loose" was pretty embarrassing.

  But that was the gist of it: Eric Fallows was still out there. Maybe that's why no one wanted to talk about it. They were afraid to summon him, like saying Bloody Mary three times. It would be different if he was rotting in a cell; it would all be in the past. Instead the whole thing still lived and breathed in the present. Eric still lived and breathed in the present, out there in the world somewhere.

  "No, not somewhere," Angela breathed. "He's here."

  "He's home."

  Friday, October 12th, 1990

  9

  Angela woke Friday morning to the sound of breathing coming from behind her.

  She had s
pent nearly three hours in the library the previous day. After driving home she had called to make sure Julie was safe, then carefully locked herself in. Special attention was paid to the new deadbolt she had installed in the door to the addition. Then she collapsed into bed.

  She had nightmares, but never woke up.

  When she did come around, it was to the prickle of hot breath across the back of her neck. Her stomach dropped; her eyes snapped open like over-tightened window shades. For a few seconds she couldn't move, couldn't do anything other lay on her side and stare at the wall. She was an ostrich again, head buried in the sand.

  It only took a few seconds for her mind to conjure a horror tour: Eric bending over the bed, feet wrapped in garbage bags, smelling her hair; Eric wearing black leather gloves and testing the edge on a fillet knife; Eric under the covers with her—behind her—naked.

  The rhythm of the breathing brought her back to reality. It was measured and slow, the breathing pattern of someone who was asleep.

  Or someone who was pretending to be.

  Either way, Angela realized, this was as good a chance as she was going to get. She steeled herself, then leapt up and pressed her back against the wall, twisting her head wildly from side to side, scanning the room. If someone was coming for her, at least it wouldn't be from behind. There was someone there, on the far side of the bed, rustling and…snoring. Angela picked up a small statuette with a heavy base off her bedside table, raised it over head, and—

  —and realized she recognized the snoring. She reversed her weapon, used the statue side to flip back a corner of the covers.

  Fucking Ted! He was here, at home, sleeping next to her. Angela remembered her certainty that Ted's return home would assuage her fears. She thought of all the nightmares she'd had, all while sleeping next to him.